I am often asked where I get my ideas. Having written a virtual vs. reality gaming mystery thriller, it is often assumed that I use AI to produce gaming strategies, if not entire plots. I do not.

Why not?

I wanted to produce something else. I am not opposed to AI’s ability to be creative. In my opinion, AI can create exceptional, highly successful products. However, I don’t like the products as much as the experience a human creative can deliver.

How do human creatives produce ‘something else’?

In my view, it all comes down to the differences between human memory and AI memory.

How do they differ?

Human memories are confabulated and are inherently biased. That’s not to say that only humans are able to distort reality and AI can’t, because AI can distort reality rather well. It’s about how human memory distortion is creatively different from AI memory distortion, and this is what makes a wholly human narrative something else or something new.

New?

AI memory distortion is at least partly derivative of human memory distortion. Human memory distortion, the source of the ‘new’ in human creativity, exists in bubbles of all new creative memory broth. It’s the unlimited creative universe. Will AI ever have that? I doubt it.

Creative broth.

This is the unlimited number of distortions the creative human brain formulates as it creates memories: facets of memories, false memories, hindsight, consistency-biased memories, egocentric memories, and even paranormal-type memories. If you want to relate this to physics, think string theory and vibrations. Think of memory distortions as vibrations. Think about how those vibrations exist in infinite dimensions. Think about making a narrative concert of any combination of those infinite vibrations that will connect your narrative to the human psyche far more powerfully than anything AI produces. AI doesn’t think in terms of vibrations. It, therefore, cannot make the ‘something new’ that a human creative can: the concert of memory vibrations that connect to people’s psyches in that distinctly human way, precisely because we are all composed of vibrations. AI does, however, connect logic-derived distorted memories to our psyches, and many people enjoy that kind of output.

As a creative professional, should I be concerned about AI-generated output?

Not if I think human creativity is superior in terms of novelty and the type of connection it produces. I am merely writing these thoughts here to clarify for those who insist that I use AI-generated narratives in my creative work that I do not, and why. Neither am I concerned about competing with AI-generated creative output in the marketplace, regardless of how successful it can be compared to wholly human creative production.

I'm not naïve enough to think that the latter will ultimately win over the market, but I do believe there is a niche market for it, and I’m okay with that.

And then I am asked how to find that niche market.

When I first started marketing my mystery thriller, I had no idea where to start. It looked hopeless. I have since discovered that it’s difficult to go niche but not impossible. Your unlimited creative broth is wanted, if only by other unlimited creative broth brewers. They are your market. They are the people who want to accept your narrative vibrating concert into their psyche, even though it will likely clash with their own vibrations. These are the people who choose to embrace the clash with a human creative rather than passively accept easily embedded AI products.

Think about your memories. Find your creative process there. Perhaps you will find it fabulously exciting to test drive your creative memory by diving into your infinity pool of memory broth? Is it capable of producing ‘something else’?

P. Portraits is the author of HEAD: A Ben Lorloch Gaming Mystery Thriller, Sixty Fragments, a collection of poems, and Sixty Shards, a collection of abstract conceptual portraits of the muse. Her work is defined by abstract conceptual realism.